Self/Other/Lover: Construction of Identity in the Life-Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald's final unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was written during his tumultuous twilight Hollywood years, while he engaged in a romantic relationship with the English gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.  Just as Graham figures as a character in Fitzgerald's novel, Fitzgerald became the subject of several memoirs Graham composed in the decades after Fitzgerald's death:  Beloved Infidel, The Rest of the Story, and The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Using the work of the autobiographical theorist Paul John Eakin, this article analyzes the ways in which Fitzgerald's thinly-veiled fiction and Graham's dubious memoirs work in tandem to construct autobiographical selves.  Incorporating a range of biographies and letters, in addition to the "fictions" and "memoirs" of these two intimately interlinked writers, this essay challenges the easy binaries between supposed and narrative forms and seeks to uncover new angles into these two authors, their work, and their literary legacies.